Celestun

We’ve spent a few lovely days in Celestun.  We planned to head back to Merida today, Sunday, but we’ve so enjoyed ourselves here that we decided to spend another night and head back to Merida tomorrow morning.  

The town is very quiet.  It’s a fishing town, and they make salt.  They don’t seem to have a lot of overnight tourists, but they come for the day in buses from Merida, and while they’re here they look at nature and eat lunch and go to the beach.  But, they’re still very sparse, and the beach in front of the hotel where we’re parked has been really quiet, and we’ve only seen a few people in the nature reserve.  The only problem we’ve had is that when we decided to go out for dinner, we found out that the town rolls up its sidewalks when the tourists leave on the buses around 5, so we barely made it in to a restaurant to eat.

This is in the middle of the town. That’s a cow, tied to a wall, right outside a house, on a town street.

Zoom in at the very center of the picture, and you can see the cow. And how it’s tied right on the side of a town street.

This is the lagoon where all the fishing boats dock for the night. We walked through early in the morning and they were getting ready to head out. It was quite busy. And stinky, very stinky.

This is an osprey we saw hunting in the nature reserve. We saw a lot of birds, but only this osprey was considerate enough to pose for a photo.

In the afternoon, we got our motos out of the camper’s moto garage and went for a ride, through the town and down a road to this abandoned salt storage complex. Tom was thrilled to get the motos out and use them, and I was thrilled that we were staying in a very small town with not much traffic where we could easily get to little used roads, and have a destination and things to see. I have to admit, it was fun, although when we got back and I looked at my Apple watch’s recording of my activity, it recorded the moto ride as a bicycle ride because my pulse was higher than it is when I walk for exercise, and I definitely didn’t exceed the speed expected for bicycling.

This is the view of the sea through a doorway of the salt storage ruin. I decided I should post a photo each of me and Tom, just so you believe we’re actually on this trip. We’re both pretty good at camera avoidance.

Here’s Tom, one building back from the building by the sea, which you can still see through the doorway.

We rode out on the salt flats. And yes, the water is actually red. Tom did some google research and found out that flamingos are pink because they eat the shrimp that eat the red algae that’s in this water. Unfortunately we didn’t see a single flamingo out here, although we saw a lot of other birds.

We got back to our camper and went for a swim in the Gulf. The water doesn’t go over our knees until we’re probably 75-100 meters from shore. We came in from our swim because another afternoon thunderstorm was coming, and were rewarded with another complete rainbow…the second since we’ve been here.

We went out to dinner, and being the last customers of the day because all of the day trippers had departed, we had our choice of tables and chose this one facing the sunset. The colors were spectacular thanks to the departing rain.

We don’t know any of these people, but it seems we weren’t the only ones who noticed that the sunset was extra special.

Today we did about the same thing we did yesterday, but the thunderstorm rolled through a little earlier, forcing our return to the camper. But, the earlier thunderstorm allowed a display of even more colors since it was a few hours before sunset. I think I may like this gray and blue and green seascape even better than last evening’s spectacular sunset. I think the thing I will remember most about this town is the constantly changing and always spectacular color palette.